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The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

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Gregory Pardlo was born in Philadelphia in 1968. His first book, Totem, received the American Poetry Review/ Honickman Prize in 2007. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Callaloo, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, Tin House, and Best American Poetry 2010, as well as several anthologies, including Angles of Ascent, the Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. He is the recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, the Lotos Club Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and The New York Times. He is an associate editor of Callaloo, and his second collection, Digest, was published by Four Way Books in 2014.

Atlantic City Sunday Morning

Gregory Pardlo

Plow-piled snow shrouded
in shadow from the abbreviating sun, snow
frosted with the exhaust of tour buses. Pigeons shift in congress.
Sun glints windshields & chrome
like cotton blooms in the monitors. Surveillance here is catholic.
From cornices cameras oscillate like raven-heads
nestled along palisades. Cameras mind entrances,
pedestrians, traffic,
the landscape from land's end to Baccarat Boulevard. I tend
the security station, notice briefly among these half-dozen screens,
a phantom looping through the busy breeze-way & out
of view. Unseasonable sparrows mating? Something
clutched like a gambler's fist, keening a halo from daylight
folded across the corridor like gift-wrap.
Little tumbleweed, if you are sparrows, you are bishops
of risk wrestling toward pain's bursaries. Jake and angel I believe
I could have conjured that woman now entering
the asphalt current to protect you. Mira! she might be saying. But
she'd be speaking to me. Waving her cashier's apron against traffic,
through the street like a banner out to where
her good deed is witnessed. Out to where I interpret her behavior
as censure. As if the pixels of light depicting the world she is framed in
were impastoed by me to the monitor's glass canvass (to
be arranged
according to the obligation of my anonymous nobility),
what good could I do
to alter the facts of the world as it hustles around her?
What odds
do those birds stand to chance anyway?
Prevention is akin to greed. Say recovery
and a sermon salts the air. Consider the postcards here
on the counter beside me. They'll do no more than carry the
word of their
senders, speak pictures: Jersey's domed capital looks like a junkyard
of church bells, a reliquary of Sundays
wracked and laid to rest. Noble martyr, Trenton fears no law
of diminishing returns, says it "makes,
the world takes:" Another prays the next wet pebble
be the one that makes a beach. Paydirt. We should be so lucky.

Gregory Pardlo

Gregory Pardlo was born in Philadelphia in 1968. His first book, Totem, received the American Poetry Review/ Honickman Prize in 2007. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Callaloo, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, Tin House, and Best American Poetry 2010, as well as several anthologies, including Angles of Ascent, the Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry.

by this poet

for Jackson Pollack
on the bar of the Cedar Tavern: the shot
that got spilled after you'd taken several rounds,
making the oak bar report
your vigor each time with the glass
emptied of its mayhem.
Before the impulse could travel its course
to spark your hand reaching again for the glass,
Creeley's

Paul Green
Of course I know the story of the scorpion
and the frog. I've known Biggers all my life.
I’ve cast down my buckets where I've
stood with them, shoulder to shoulder, our bodies
bent like double helices in the fields. And
when the mob came for Dick didn’t I sit anyways
outside his quarters all